The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Be Quick, Be Interesting - Create Captivating Conversation

Learn conversational agility to think quickly on your feet, be incredibly smooth, funny, and clever - all at once. Goodbye awkward silences! No matter where you lie on the spectrum of awkward to engaging, witty banter is always the end goal - and it should be. Witty banter, and all the steps that lead to it, allows you to disarm and connect with anyone, immediately exit boring small talk mode, and instantly build rapport.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

What do Disney, Bollywood, and "the Batkid" teach us about how to create celebrity experiences for our audiences? How can a vending machine inspire world peace? Can being "imperfect" make your business more marketable? Can a selfie improve one's confidence? When can addiction be a good thing?

People Tactics: Strategies to Navigate Delicate Situations, Communicate Effectively, and Win Anyone Over

Do you want to boost your people skills to easily build rapport with anyone? Or just avoid uncomfortable misunderstandings and awkward situations? If you (1) have trouble speaking so others listen and respect you, and (2) never know what to say or how to act around new people, that feeling of dread and despair isn't something you have to live with. People Tactics is your key to social intelligence and better relationships.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than 15 million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase. But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges: Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales. But so do the other eight. Whether we’re employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others.

Conversation Tactics: Strategies to Charm, Befriend, and Defend

Do you want to become more charming and likable - instantly? Or just make sure you can defend yourself verbally, and not be a doormat? Do you lose arguments, find yourself speechless, or get taken advantage of by others? Or do you just want to build meaningful connections and friendships quickly? Sounds like you need to learn as many conversation tactics as possible! In this book you'll learn 18 powerful techniques that can be used for everything under the sun.

The Lost Art of Listening, Second Edition: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships

One person talks; the other listens. It's so basic that we take it for granted. Unfortunately, most of us think of ourselves as better listeners than we actually are. Why do we so often fail to connect when speaking with family members, romantic partners, colleagues, or friends? How do emotional reactions get in the way of real communication? This thoughtful, witty, and empathic book has already helped over 100,000 people break through conflicts and transform their personal and professional relationships.

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

His work is cited by the world's best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic best seller - one of the most influential business books of all time - innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right - yet still lose market leadership. Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation.

The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field

After reading an article about a local farmer who had dedicated his life to growing giant pump­kins, Michalowicz realized the same process could apply to growing a business. He tested the Pumpkin Plan on his own company and transformed it into a remarkable, multimillion-dollar industry leader. First he did it for himself. Then for others. And now you.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a "position" in a prospective customer's mind, one that reflects a company's own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.

Verbal Judo, Updated Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion

When you react, the event controls you. When you respond, you’re in control. Verbal Judo is the classic guide to the martial art of the mind and mouth that can help you defuse confrontations and generate cooperation, whether you're talking to a boss, a spouse, or even a teenager. For more than a generation, Dr. George J. Thompson's essential handbook has taught people how to communicate more confidently and persuasively in any situation.

Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

Whether it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning - a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to talk about all sorts of things - from your new labradoodle puppy to the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s backhand to things that don’t exist at all, like flying pigs.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

In this book Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create lives that are both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of whom or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

One of the most popular Fortune articles in many years was a cover story called "What It Takes to Be Great." Geoff Colvin offered new evidence that top performers in any field - from Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill to Warren Buffett and Jack Welch - are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness doesn't come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades.

Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect

In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience, revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world-other people and our relation to them.

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves

Nearly everyone swears - whether it's over a few too many drinks, in reaction to a stubbed toe, or in flagrante delicto. And yet we sit idly by as words are banned from television and censored in books. We insist that people excise profanity from their vocabularies, and we punish children for yelling the very same dirty words that we'll mutter in relief seconds after they fall asleep. Swearing, it seems, is an intimate part of us that we have decided to selectively deny.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism

What if charisma could be taught? For the first time, science and technology have taken charisma apart, figured it out and turned it into an applied science: In controlled laboratory experiments, researchers could raise or lower people's level of charisma as if they were turning a dial. What you'll find here is practical magic: unique knowledge, drawn from a variety of sciences, revealing what charisma really is and how it works. You'll get both the insights and the techniques you need to apply this knowledge. The world will become your lab, and every person you meet, a chance to experiment.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy - instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing - it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.

Publisher's Summary

How to become a trusted resource for consumers in a society of constant manipulation.

People decide who to trust, what advice to heed, and which individuals to forge personal or transactional relationships with based on a simple metric of believability. Success, in turn, comes from understanding one basic principle: how to be more trusted. Likeonomics offers a new vision of a world beyond Facebook where personal relationships, likeability, brutal honesty, extreme simplicity, and basic humanity are behind everything from multi-million dollar mergers to record-breaking product sales. There is a real ROI to likeability, and exactly how big it is will amaze you.

Likeonomics provides real-world case studies of brands and individuals that have used these principles to become wildly successful, including:

An iconic technology brand that awakened a revolution among their employees by standing for something bigger than their products

A Portuguese singer who used YouTube to rack up more than 30 million views and launch her professional career. A regional team of financial advisors that went from being last in the nation among 176 branches to first, and stayed there for 13 of the next 15 years

A tiny professional sports talent agent who achieved the impossible by landing the 1 drafted player in the NFL draft as a client through the power of relationships

Author Rohit Bhargava is a founding member of the world's largest group of social media strategists at Ogilvy, where he has led marketing strategy for clients including Intel, Pepsi, Lenovo, Seiko, Unilever, and dozens of other large companies

With Likeonomics as a guide, listeners will get unconventional advice on how to stand out in a good way, avoid the hype and strategic traps of social media, and appeal to customers in a way that secures your company as a trusted and believable resource.

maybe anyone who can't do a simple google search on their own. I thought it would be a teaching book, but instead it's hundreds of examples of people who have done things the author likes. It's like having someone read you the encyclopedia... not really teaching you, just saying "here's a whole lot of people who did it" before you.

What do you think your next listen will be?

nothing by this author.

Have you listened to any of Christine Marshall’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

I guess if you want to be entertained by a list of people who are successful, but not really taught anything...

Any additional comments?

I thought we could return books we didn't like. I was planning on returning this one. Where is that feature?